Going to restaurants for a birthday is pretty common. It often surprised me though when I see restaurants charge people money to have a birthday cake where if the group brings their own cake they would still be charged like say a ten dollar fee. I would have thought the amount of food that people would order would more than make up for costs. Especially if it is a large group. Today I kind of saw it from a different perspective which was kind of interesting.
Essentially the group of people brought in a cake where I suppose the restaurant wasn’t used to seeing this type of thing much. The group then asked for matches to light the candle but the restaurant didn’t have any. The customers didn’t give up though as they proceeded to ask every waitress if they had something to light candles. Eventually it looked like they used a staff’s lighter. Afterwards they still called for the waitresses again and asked for a bunch of dishes and spoons for the cake. They did comply. In the end the cake wasn’t finished and so they asked for some take out containers to bring the cake home. I was just thinking to myself it only takes one group of people to enforce these kinds of fees for everyone else as they were pretty demanding in many ways.
The business definitely had to take in extra labor and resource costs to accommodate to this. It made me think how as a business whether or not it’s better for you to just have a guideline in general for fees like this so that it gives you leverage to make up for these situations. I would imagine though where even if you did have that policy you could then easily just waive it off if it turns out the customer wasn’t that demanding. You can’t really do it the other way around.